From Social Work to Social Change

It is through our own wounds that we’re called into the work of transformation.

Anton Flores-Maisonet is an immigrant advocate and social change
worker in LaGrange, Georgia. Flores organizes through Casa Alterna, a house of
hospitality on a cul-de-sac comprised of first wave immigrants. Flores was a
keynote speaker at the Political Theology Network’s inaugural conference in
February, 2018.

Originally trained as a social worker, Flores was radicalized by
his protests of the US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as well as his experiences
as a foster parent and advocate for children in the
foster care system. Since 2006, he has worked blended social work, activism,
and faith-rooted organizing in his communal life with immigrants in his community.

KL: For folks unfamiliar with
Casa Alterna, can you tell us what a day in your common life looks like?

AF: Casa Alterna is a place
where acts of mercy and justice are undergirded by the principle of
hospitality. Uniquely, the solidarity we seek is with immigrants from Latin
America.

Historically this has played
itself out in different ways: by having an intentional community that was
multi-national, by making home ownership a viable option for first wave
immigrant families regardless of their status, by founding another house of
hospitality (El Refugio) outside Stewart Detention Center, by organizing a
national movement to call for the closure of that for-profit facility.

Now, what it looks like since
2017 is that this house of hospitality, Casa Alterna, exists in the midst of a
first-wave immigrant neighborhood, almost entirely Guatemalan. We are a
ministry of presence here. We have an after-school program during the school
year, and this summer we’ve held a freedom school for neighborhood children.

KL: We’ve heard a lot about
immigrant children in the news this summer as we’ve witnessed the racist and
horrific policy of separating families at the border. I know a lot of your
current work is with the immigrant children on your block. How have these
national trends impacted your hyper-local work?

AF: First, we have been
assisting unaccompanied minors for a few years now; helping to find placements
when there is no viable family member. Just
yesterday I was contacted by a child’s attorney. The child arrived to the U.S.
alone and the child called the attorney in tears because he was being forced by
his caregiver to work and pay rent rather than attend school. And this child is
of an age where attendance is compulsory.

When we moved into our current
neighborhood in the fall and we started our after-school program we did an
intake form with the children. One of the questions was: what do you like best
about this neighborhood? Another was what do you like least about this
neighborhood? Almost all the children had something to say about immigration
enforcement officials. “The bad men” is the way some of these kids
would describe them.

We’ve worked to make this
cul-de-sac a place where children don’t have to live in fear of being separated
from their parents because of racist policies. That has meant offering defend-your-rights presentations and filing
complaints against ICE agents. But it also means accompanying some of our
recently arrived asylum-seeking families to immigration court as well as just
being involved in the beautiful day-to-day activities of this resilient neighborhood.

KL: One of the ways you’re drawing from the well of resilience and
creating that community of resistance and sanctuary
on your block is through a Freedom School,
drawing on SNCC’s practice in Mississippi in the summer of 1964. Can you say a
bit more about that?

AF: This summer we organized our
first Freedom School; we called it Camp ¡Libertad! The aim of Camp ¡Libertad!
was to develop confident, literate, and empowered Latinx children who will be
change-makers in their families and local community.

One of the things we’ve
emphasized is whose land we’re on. We talked about the Woodland and Creek
nations that lived here and the Indian Removal Act of 1829. And then you have a
United Methodist college moving here in 1831. So we researched some of those
things together to find out what it looked like here in the early 1800s. Who
would have been here? What would that have looked like? And of course, they are
children so we’ll also played
some Native American games and and read some folklore.

Then together we learned about this
community’s history during the Jim Crow era; how our
neighborhood was an separate and unequal
African American community of domestic workers and landscapers for some
of the elite white families in our town.

Goose Holler, as our street was called
during those days, was one of three African American enclaves near what is now the
exclusive Country Club Drive. It was the center of the three communities.
Interestingly, one of the other communities just west of us still exists and,
catch its name – Redline Alley. I don’t know if the name was intentional but I
sometimes wonder if I’m the only person in town who knows the significance of
that term. One of the few remaining neighborhoods of the Jim Crow era in our
town is named after a discriminatory housing and banking term.

If you look at the topography of
the land in Goose Holler you can see that that those who lived here before us
practiced terrace gardening. Older neighbors and former residents recall
chicken and children running about freely. These
descriptions of our neighborhood’s yesteryears sound an
awful lot like the neighborhood today; with
folks cultivating their own food, the chickens, and the children out playing.

So this summer, with the children we researched
our neighborhood’s history. For this we used newspaper articles and two primary
sources: a couple of octogenarians, one black, the other white. We recorded and
reflected upon their stories.

Then the children moved into action as they
realized their political and civic power. Three of
our neighborhood’s children, whose average age was 13 years old, spoke
before the mayor and city council and formally requested
that a street sign be approved that recaptured our historic name. The African
American members of the city council quickly and enthusiastically stumbled over
one another trying to make the motion and second. One white city council
person, most impressed with the eloquent and persuasive presentation of these
new leaders mused aloud if anyone could reject such a well-prepared
presentation. And with that the children saw civic engagement and democracy in
action as the request was approved unanimously and, because the children led,
our street has recovered a historic name from a time when our land’s residents
were stripped of their agency.

KL: I love how you’ve drawn on
the Freedom School tradition and applied it to your own context in all of its
specifity.

AF: As a child I would have
never known, and most adults don’t know, the history of where they live. Now,
it is the children of our neighborhood who are our teachers. They’re teaching their parents about the Creeks
and Woodlands, and about Miss Mattie and her memories as a black child in Goose
Holler. It is our children who confidently welcome visitors to Casa Alterna and
proudly share this recovered history and renewed purpose. The spirit of
resilience is alive and well in Goose Holler; how can it not be? It’s in
the roots.

KL: One of the things that I am
fascinated by in your own life’s work is that you were trained as a social
worker, and then moved into more activist work, especially around immigration
detention and Stewart Detention Center in particular. But then you’ve also drawn on traditions of community
organizing as well. I wonder, how do these practices of social work, activism,
and organizing all fit together in your practice?

AF: In social work it all fits together: case management, advocacy,
and community organizing. I draw from a stream of my profession called
radical social work. Unfortunately, radical
social work wasn’t something that I was taught in the institutions where I
studied. It was something I learned about after my formal education. But social work is rooted in a tradition of
struggle for social justice. Even today it’s right there in the preamble our
profession’s code of ethics. There is a historic commitment to not just
alleviate suffering but to also dismantle the systems of injustice and
oppression.

In my practice, there is also a strong
thread of theological reflection and
imagination. I try to understand my activism and
organizing from a faith-rooted perspective.

KL: Why is that?

AF: Because I was raised in the
South!

KL: Ha! Can you say more than
that?

AF: I was raised in a nominally
Catholic family. When we moved to the South during my preadolescence I began regularly attending evangelical
churches. So I remember the oft-quoted
question: what would Jesus do? That was an easier question to ask if only relegated issues of
personal piety. And that tended to be what was
magnified: the personal. But ever since childhood, there has been this inexplicable social justice bent within me that I think explains why I was drawn to social
work. Then, social work offered me some theories and
skill sets to analyze human behavior within the contexts of systems and
our social environment. What I needed though
was to find a way to merge my deeply personal faith with my expanding passion
for justice.

I met my now wife of 24 years
when we were both in college. We met in a Bible study at a Baptist church. In
that church, the closest I can
recall to them ever discussing any topic regarding social ethics was when they
discussed abortion. And their answer was simply to
repeal a law.

While there was deep conviction, I always
recall it feeling disconnected to a viewpoint that would deem all of life as
sacred, from the unborn, to the poor, and to those on death row. I wasn’t
offered a guidepost on how to discern the complexities of ethics; just a court
ruling that needed to be overturned. It was obviously
very lopsided. I would figure out later, I could have much more appreciation
for what is called a seamless garment ethic of life, one that views all of life
is sacred. I also developed a theoretical and theological lens that
found it more important to dismantle the conditions that lead to injustice and
oppression rather than to engage in a binary debate that often blamed victims
for their circumstances.

So Charlotte and I are dating and we’re
attending this church and that’s the only “social
issue” they’re talking about. I’m a social work student interning at a shelter for
children who are abused and neglected. These children were placed in an
old school that was being repurposed as a substandard shelter. It might as well
have had a revolving door because it was all too
common to see children leave this facility, have a failed placement with a
foster family, and return right back only more bitter and emotionally
detached. I’m seeing these kids who need families,
and a system ill-equipped to handle their immense needs, but in my
congregation I can’t think of a single family who has
adopted a child. I kept pondering, what does
it mean to be pro-life? If you repeal this law, who is going to care for these
kids when no one is caring for them right now?
That was a moment of theological dissonance for
me.

So, when Charlotte and I got
engaged, we naturally talked about our dreams for our future family. I kept
going back to that moment and it made me want to adopt children. Logically then, in
our marriage when we first decided to raise children, we turned to
fostering. We helped raise some children in
need of temporary children via direct relationships with their parents or
caregivers. But when we turned to our local department of family and children
services in hopes of adopting, we were quickly matched with a toddler. This
child was eventually adopted but, heartbreakingly, not
by us. After a tumultuous relationship with the case manager and
supervisor and unfounded and uninvestigated allegations of inducing the birth
mother, the small child was forcibly removed from our
custody. The trauma and pain of that loss was so great.

But that was also the very moment when I began to see how institutions can
perpetuate injustice and oppression and that my faith and convictions compelled
me to act for justice. The foster system
needed reform, not solely because of my injury but because of the egregious ways policies and
practices fail to ensure children are safeguarded and their best interests
secured. Someone had to hold such systems accountable.

I began to organize protests
outside of our local department. I helped publicly uncover repeated incidents of
false allegations that were being used to usurp the rights of foster parents
and the best interest of foster children. We worked
with our local newspaper and an award-winning investigative series was published. Case
managers and supervisors were transferred. That was a
pivotal time for me in understanding that this faith-rooted desire to seek
justice, could not be relegated to just the personal piety. It had to challenge
structures and institutions, policies and
laws.

It was out of my own stubbornness and perhaps
resilience then that out of the ashes of a
failed placement, Charlotte and I adopted a
Guatemalan toddler named Jairo.

Because Jairo, a Mayan Guatemalan, was from
a different cultural background than either of us, we felt it vital to both
learn and “adopt” his culture as well as keep him in close contact with other
Guatemalans. Two primary ways we accomplished this was by spending summers
serving at a seminary in Guatemala as well as regularly attending a
Spanish-language congregation in our community.

In that church we began to hear the cries of
unjust suffering that confronted this mostly, what I call, undocumentable
community. And so with a lens informed by theory, practice, and personal
experience. I was increasingly sensitive to stories of systemic abuse and
exploitation. What I thought was an attempt at simply cultural appreciation
became the seedbed of a new vocation. Through our own
wound we’re being called into this.

KL: In some ways, I
imagine, the work with the kids on your block brings you full circle: walking
alongside them, teaching them about the history of their place, inviting them
into the work of resistance and hospitality, creating sanctuary on the
cul-de-sac. This is powerful, social change work. Thank you for sharing a bit
about it with me.

Kyle Lambelet is managing editor of the Political Theology Network’s website and a postdoctoral fellow at Emory University’s Candler School of Theology. He teaches and researches at the intersection of political theology, religious ethics and social change. His current research explores the moral and political dimensions of nonviolent struggle. He is writing a book tentatively titled ¡Presente! Nonviolent Politics and the Resurrection of the Dead that develops an extended case study of the movement to close the School of the Americas.

I love this article. Truthful, ethical, -just plain right!! I have worked in the field of adoption and foster care for over 55 years and have adopted and fostered several children of many races. I am now writing my third book on the core issues, attachment and trauma. I so honor and respect your work.
Sincerely, Sharon Roszia